I can tell you for certain that she would not be impressed by personal attacks ("favourite feminist bogey-woman") in the middle of a debate on interpretation; as I said, she was the original civilized person. But as for the rest, you seem not to realize that some people live outside politics and really and truly have no views on them. You may not be aware that a lot of women - not necessarily either stupid or ignorant - opposed women's suffrage, and it is very much my impression that she would have been among them. (Incidentally, I don't think it's even an issue: if you have any such thing as suffrage, then any being endowed with intelligence and free will ought to have it. We don't give angels and devils the vote only because we don't know how to issue electoral certificates to them. That is just to avoid any further personal suggestions.)
Jane Austen was wholly outside the politics of her time. The few times she mentioned anything at all that was politically relevant, she was consistently on the wrong side. She mentions with approval the naval career of some minor character, at a time when the Royal Navy bred monsters like Lord Nelson and was kept going by the press gang, rum and the cat. The only time when she mentions the actual economic activity of one of her rich characters, he is a plantation owner in the West Indies; and this is one of her nicest, most generous fatherly old men, Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park. The whole agrarian society she describes existed on exploitation, inequality and prejudice; things which do not affect her, but which she does not oppose, because she is largely ignorant of them. She does depict the life of an industrial town (although the town in question is Portsmouth, a naval harbour) with great distaste, again in Mansfield Park, but there is no suggestion whatever that she has any idea of the structural reasons why it is so nasty. I would blame her (as I blame Dorothy L.Sayers) if she was awake to the meaning of politics and had taken the wrong side; the point is that she is not, and she is conscious of it, and wants to work on the things she does understand - human relationships in a narrow circle of friends, acquaintances and relatives more or less connected to the upper classes.
Jane Austen was wholly outside the politics of her time. The few times she mentioned anything at all that was politically relevant, she was consistently on the wrong side. She mentions with approval the naval career of some minor character, at a time when the Royal Navy bred monsters like Lord Nelson and was kept going by the press gang, rum and the cat. The only time when she mentions the actual economic activity of one of her rich characters, he is a plantation owner in the West Indies; and this is one of her nicest, most generous fatherly old men, Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park. The whole agrarian society she describes existed on exploitation, inequality and prejudice; things which do not affect her, but which she does not oppose, because she is largely ignorant of them. She does depict the life of an industrial town (although the town in question is Portsmouth, a naval harbour) with great distaste, again in Mansfield Park, but there is no suggestion whatever that she has any idea of the structural reasons why it is so nasty. I would blame her (as I blame Dorothy L.Sayers) if she was awake to the meaning of politics and had taken the wrong side; the point is that she is not, and she is conscious of it, and wants to work on the things she does understand - human relationships in a narrow circle of friends, acquaintances and relatives more or less connected to the upper classes.
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